"Knowledge is an immense power… the masses want to know…" -Peter Kropotkin

Communique from the last Mapuche hungerstrikers

On October 2, most of the Mapuche political prisoners on hungerstrike in the prisons of the Chilean state announced an end to their action while the hungerstrikers at Angol prison declared they would continue. On October 7, they released another communique explaining their struggle. The following day, after nearly 90 days without eating, they ended their hungerstrike, although without signing onto any agreement with the Chilean state.

We consider this communique to be of great importance because it clearly explains how the modifications to the antiterrorist law are simply cosmetic and do not at all guarantee the completion of the demands brought forward by this mobilization. Furthermore, and most importantly, the hungerstrikers of Angol prison want to make it plain that this action did not occur as a partial claim within the juridical realm, but as a projection of the Mapuche struggle. This is where we see that an action such as this is not a simple pressure brought to bear against the party in power, rather it reveals the substance of what is and must be the struggle by the Mapuche against the State/Capital. A struggle that, through this kind of mobilization, continuously strengthens itself and avoids a fossilization that would prevent it from taking on a larger framework, such as a struggle for self-determination. It’s a way of realizing what the Mapuche brothers and sisters are capable of doing: taking control of their lives, modifying the reality produced for us and controlled by the State/Capital, which presents itself as independent from us and turns us into simple spectators. In other words, this is reality and we won’t simply contemplate it or run around according to the schedule with which it dominates us. We are capable of changing this reality so that its independent movement begins to weaken. Not at the level of appearances or mere knowledge, but in a praxis that acts on objective situations and transforms them, by acting on the separations that falsely isolate us from others and from our own activity on a daily basis.

We are not saying that with hungerstrikes we can achieve self-determination, but that with all kinds of actions we begin to compose a unitary practical critique of the State/Capital. One doesn’t proclaim this, one puts it in practice and changes the conditions that limit our daily ability to take action. In other words we “open” the context within which we take action today so that tomorrow our possibilities will have expanded to create the conditions not to express our total critique but to execute it. This must not be understood as a “tactic” within an idea of the accumulation of forces or gradualism [trans: common Marxist approaches to revolution], it should only be understood for what it is: our activity produces reality and this reality has broken from our control. Reappropriating a way of acting that is our own, subversive, and negative of what exists is how we produce the conditions to realize that the insurrection that uncages the revolution is a question of our own necessity; by modifying the objective situation we are modifying our own position within it. This is true in all struggle.